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Robert Katz identifies three critical skill sets for successful leaders: technical skills, interpersonal (or human) skills, and conceptual skills. Leaders must possess specific technical skills that assist them in optimizing managerial performance. While these three broad skill categories encompass a wide spectrum of capabilities, each describes how these skills interact with management at various levels.
Skills of Successful Leaders
Defining Technical Skills
Of the three skill sets identified by Katz, technical skills are the broadest, most easily defined category. A technical skill is a learned capacity in just about any field of work, study, or even play. For example, the quarterback of a football team must know how to plant his feet and position his arm for accuracy and distance—both technical skills. A mechanic needs to be able to deconstruct and reconstruct an engine, employ various machinery (lifts, computer scanning equipment, etc.), and install a muffler.
Leaders also need a broad range of technical know-how. All industries need management, and management must exist at various organizational levels. A technical skill for a leader might include a working understanding of a piece of equipment: the ability to coach the employee on its operation, as well as communicate to people the essential functions of the machinery.
Leaders in other corporate roles and at higher levels require critical technical skills. These can include office-based competencies such as typing, programming, website maintenance, writing, giving presentations, and using software such as Microsoft Office or Adobe. Office environments require complex communicative, technological, and data-organization skills to optimize managerial performance.
Successful organizational leaders must learn to use technological assets, collecting critical information and data to communicate upward for strategic planning. An example of information management is a mid-level manager in the automotive industry responsible for recognizing global marketing potential. This individual must realize the legal, demographic, social, technological, and economic considerations of entering a market; the manager will use effective research and delegation skills and consolidate the information into a helpful presentation using technological and communicative skills.
Katz postulates that the higher up in the organization an individual rises, the more conceptual skills (and fewer technical skills) are necessary. Senior managers need fewer technical skills because strategic decision-making is inherently more conceptual; mid and lower-level skills such as data collection, assessment, and discussion are more technical. All management disciplines require various skill sets for effective business processes.
Conceptual Skills
Conceptual skills revolve around generating ideas through creative intuitions and a comprehensive understanding of a given context.
Conceptual skills represent one of the three skill sets ident